There was one silent witness to the increasing decay of his powers that could not be overlooked. The garden gave him away. People coming to visit me and it were embarrassed to know what to say, or they even hinted that it would be an economy to allow Bettesworth a small pension and hire a younger man, who would do as much work, and do it better, in half the time. As if I needed to be told that! But then they were not witnesses, with me, of the pluck--better worth preserving than any garden--with which Bettesworth sought to make amends for his vanished youth. His tenacity deepened my regard for him, even while its poor results almost wore out my patience. He who had once moved with such vigour was getting slow; and the time was coming, if it had not come, when I had to wait and dawdle while he dragged along behind me from one part of the garden to another. A more serious matter was that with greater effort on his part the garden ground was less well worked. I don't believe he knew that. He used a favourite old spade, worn down like himself, and never realized that "two spits deep" with this tool were little better than one spit with a proper one; and he could not make out why the carrots forked, and the peas failed early. But the worst trial of all was due to another and more pitiful cause. I could reconcile myself to indifferent crops--after all, I had enough--but exasperation was daily renewed by the little daily failures in routine work, owing to his defective sight, which grew worse and worse. There were the garden paths. With what care the old man drew his broom along them, working by faith and not sight, blindly feeling for the rubbish he could not see, and getting it all save from some corner or other of which his theories had forgotten to take account! Little nests of disorder collected in this way, to-day here, to-morrow somewhere else, surprising, offensive to the eye. Again, at the lawn-mowing, never man worked harder than Bettesworth, or more conscientiously; but he could not see the track of his machine, and seams of uncut grass often disfigured the smoothness of the turf even after he had gone twice over it to make sure of perfection. It was alarming to see him go near a flower border. He would avoid treading on any plant of whose existence he knew, by an act of memory; but he could not know all, and I had to limit his labours strictly to that part of the garden he planted or tended himself.